Wanderfound

Pitch up to about a 45° angle of attack as soon as you touch atmosphere, and keep it there until you've achieved level flight. Then gradually lower the nose, basing the speed of your descent on the temperature of your hottest bits. Airbrakes make the process much easier, but they aren't necessary.

Slightly cheesy design hack: radiators. Stick a small one somewhere in the vicinity of your overheating part and your exploding problems will go away. This 'un has one of the small curved radiators on top of each of the long lateral tanks, protecting the normally vulnerable 747-style wings (BTW, did your Mk2 plane have a Mk1 cockpit? The one-seaters are a bit explody; low heat tolerance). Feel free to now have a lengthy argument over the realism or otherwise of this working.

You may find this useful: http://youtu.be/ji7AV2D3anY

My old 1980 BMW 323i was a nifty little thing, but my current favourite is my new toy: Not a car, but there aren't many sub-$10,000 cars that will do 0-100km/h in 3.8s. Much of fun on a good scratching road.

Nope.

That was on an iPad. It's similarly missing on an iPhone, so mobile may need a tweak as well. Edit: the answer about mobile is implied in your post, I now realise. Is there any way to add an Imgur link without the button?

The career mode is not defined by the tech tree. Unlocking the tree is just stage one (and usually achievable with a couple of Mun/Minmus trips and maybe some interplanetary probes). Once you've unlocked all the toys, use them. Colonise the solar system. Decorate KSC with landed asteroids. Find all of the easter eggs and make up your own theory for what connects them.

I don't care about the aesthetics, but functionality on iOS is awful. Very buggy, very bad UI.

One slight difference of opinion with Geschosskopf's excellent advice: the early aircraft nodes are very useful for low-altitude survey and part testing contracts. The first aircraft node makes it easy to build a twin-Juno subsonic jet that can lug your science gear to any biome on Kerbin that you have the patience to reach, for almost no cost. And in late game, spaceplane economics stomp conventional rockets. Once you've got a fleet of SSTO tankers refuelling your orbital gas stations, your RAPIER/Nuke spaceplanes can wander all over the Kerbol system at trivial expense.

From an iOS point of view, the new forum is buggy as all hell and routinely makes posting images or editing quotes impossible. There's no realistic chance of them shifting back, though. Hope for fine-tuning.

Most likely: you accidentally set some trim (alt + direction to set) during the ascent. Alt + x to cancel.

100m/s (AKA 360km/h) is a crazy fast speed to land a light aircraft. It's not a crazy fast speed to land a hypersonic spaceplane. But, as others have said, S-turns to lose speed in the air and crank up the default (rear) brake settings. In tough situations (e.g. interplanetary, landing a 747 on the island), drag chutes work a treat. Retrothrust can also be helpful; if your jets don't reverse, stash a pair of Twitch or Monoprop engines in an appropriate place.

Repeating what some others have said: begin by launching a capsule with science gear on it to both the launchpad and the runway. Use this to unlock the basic tech nodes. Then, break some records and do some contracts so you can make some money. Launch Jeb or Val into a suborbital flight (make sure to give it a bit of angle to ease reentry), use the science and cash from that to unlock more tech. That should enable you to build a basic orbit-capable rocket, which will bring in more cash and science. By that stage, you should have a roll on; just keep doing contracts, preferably more than one per mission. Your first financial target is to upgrade the Tracking Station, Mission Control and the Astronaut Complex so you can get your patched conics and EVA abilities. Once you have EVA, unlocking the early tech tree is a cinch; just launch into a polar orbit and get "EVA over..." science from every biome. If you find yourself short of a little science, just load a probe core, parachute and all of your science gear onto a finned SRB. Fire it off in any direction from KSC and you'll hit a biome to grab science from. The only expense is the SRB fuel. If there's a part you need that you haven't unlocked yet, see if there's a part testing contract for that part. This is actually the main purpose of the part test contracts; emergency access to higher tech parts. You keep access to it until you fulfil the contract, so if you want to keep playing with that hot new experimental part all you have to do is not run the test. Watch out, though; some tests require you to activate the part, some only require that the part be taken to a certain speed/location. Don't pay to recruit crew; do "rescue from orbit" contracts instead. Similarly, wait for space station contracts to appear before throwing up your orbital fuel stations. Unlocking most of the rest of the tech tree can be done with a few Mun/Minmus missions. The trick there is to carry a scientist (to reset goo pods etc) and hit as many biomes as possible in a single trip. It's also a good idea to stack contracts; don't just go to the Mun, get science from orbit/flag planting/satellite delivery/part testing contracts to do on the way. The last few tech nodes are usually covered by my first interplanetary missions. Send probes to the difficult ones, crewed ships to the easy ones, hit the transfer windows whenever they appear. If you've only been playing sandbox, you're probably accustomed to monstrously overengineered ships. Less is more; a basic orbital ship should be less than √10,000, a basic Munlander return around √30,000.

You can switch them earlier, but you shouldn't. Altitude is speed in the bank; milk those hyper-efficient airbreathers for as much height as you can. Keep the AoA low so you don't lose too much speed [1], but try to float up to the jet ceiling before lighting the fireworks. I normally switch over from jets to rockets just below 30,000m. [1] Low AoA while the engine is low-thrust, that is. Crank it up over Mach 4 while below 20,000m (careful with the heat), then pull into a sharp zoom climb to boost your apoapsis close to 30,000m. But then lower the nose back down to prograde and keep it there while you wait to reach 30,000m and switchover to rocket mode. Pull the nose back up to 45° when the rockets start, flatten off at the top.

Posting from an iPad, the quote function appears broken. Trying to quote one post results in a quote of all posts on that page, and it does not appear to be possible to delete or edit the quoted material. Edit: not consistent, does not always occur.

OTOH, there's no reason why a probe can't be a return mission. It's a lot easier to pull that off with a light probe than a heavy crewed capsule, too. On the other other hand, the big thing you lose in probe missions is the scientist's ability to reset experiments. For near-Kerbin missions (Mun, Minmus) you usually can't beat a scientist plus probe core. 9,000m/s ΔV should see you able to hit three or four biomes on the Mun, or pretty much all of Minmus in a single trip.

BTW, non-obvious design trick: see those little radiators on the top of the lateral tanks? Completely removes overheating problems on the usually-vulnerable 747-style wings. You can crank that thing up to Mach 5 on the jets if you've got the patience.

Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/xpxdx1egyatwz8y/Kerbodyne%20Herakles.craft?dl=0

The "Insert Imgur album" button does not appear to be available when editing a post.

Deleted post; the new forum software sucks.

Anybody linked to Brecher's take yet? [url]https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/cheap-drones/[/url]

[quote name='eddiew']Sorry, semi-common parlance for a 2.5m orange tank. A big red lifter is an SSTO that can carry such a thing to orbit for use as a fuel depot. Seems to be the benchmark for all mk3 designs in the SSTO thread :) Personally I 'cheat' and use tweakscale to make mk2 wings and engines suitable for an mk3 fuselage, but there's definitely a lot of interest in pure-stock mk3s that can carry such a load.[/QUOTE] Always called 'em orange, myself. I'll see what I can work up. Heavy cargo lifters aren't too tricky.

[quote name='eddiew']Handy little guide :) If you're considered doing any more, there's a lot of folks out there would love a 'big red' tutorial - seems to be about the toughest thing to get flying ^^[/QUOTE] "Big red"?

[video=youtube_share;ji7AV2D3anY]http://youtu.be/ji7AV2D3anY[/video] Craft file at [URL]https://www.dropbox.com/s/xlh3xh4hy197xx5/Kerbodyne%20Demo%201.craft?dl=0[/URL]

Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/xlh3xh4hy197xx5/Kerbodyne%20Demo%201.craft?dl=0